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Methods Inf Med. 2006;45(4):462-9.

Cite
A modified method of activity-based costing for
objectively reducing cost drivers in hospitals Favorites

P Cao  1 , S Toyabe, S Kurashima, M Okada, K Akazawa

Affiliations expand
PMID: 16964366

Abstract
Objectives: Activity-based costing (ABC) is widely used to precisely allocate indirect costs to medical Title & authors
services. In the ABC method, the indirect cost is divided among the medical services in proportion to
the volume of "cost drivers", for example, labor hours and the number of hours of surgery. However, Abstract
the workload of data collection of cost drivers can be time-consuming and a considerable burden if
there are many cost drivers. The authors aim to develop a method for objectively reducing the cost Similar articles
drivers used in the ABC method.

Methods: In the ABC method, the cost driver is assigned for each activity. We assume that these Cited by
activities and cost drivers are the best combination. Our method, that is cost driver reduction (CDR),
can objectively select surrogates of the cost drivers for each activity in ABC from candidate cost Publication types
drivers. Concretely, the total indirect cost of an activity is temporarily allocated to the medical
services using each candidate of cost drivers. The difference between the costs calculated by each MeSH terms
candidate and the proper cost driver used in ABC is calculated to evaluate the similarity by the
evaluation function. LinkOut - more
resources
Results: We estimated the cost of laboratory tests using our method and revealed that the number of
cost drivers could be reduced from seven in the ABC to four. Similarly, the results of cost estimation
obtained by our method were as accurate as those calculated using the ABC.

Conclusions: Our method provides two advantages compared to the ABC method: 1) it provides
results that are as accurate as those of the ABC method, and 2) it is simpler to perform complicated
estimation of hospital costs.

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Publication types
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms
Accounting / methods*
Accounting / statistics & numerical data
Clinical Laboratory Techniques / classification
Clinical Laboratory Techniques / economics*
Cost Allocation / methods*
Cost Control
Data Collection / methods
Direct Service Costs / statistics & numerical data
Financial Management, Hospital / methods*
Financial Management, Hospital / statistics & numerical data
Hospital Costs / statistics & numerical data*
Hospitals, University / economics
Humans
Japan
Laboratories, Hospital / economics*
Laboratories, Hospital / statistics & numerical data

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